Roots of the Political Crisis in Venezuela
Since the election, “Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) has yet to publish any electoral results.” This was pointed out in an August 21, 2024, New Left Review (NLR) article by Gabriel Hetland, “Fraud Foretold?,” “The CNE [National Electoral Council] has issued two televised bulletins, in which results were announced orally.”
Evidence indicates Maduro lost the vote
“The CNE’s failure to publish detailed results, indeed any results at all, is in marked contrast to the past twenty years, in which results were published days and sometimes hours after polls closed,” Hetland continued:
“In the December 2015 parliamentary elections, which I observed, it took just over 48 hours to produce a clear breakdown. This year, the CNE says it suffered a massive hacking attack that prevented it from doing so, but it has not presented any evidence to back this up.”
This remains true today, nearly a month since NLR published Hetland’s article, and almost two months since the election.
“The alleged hacking does not appear to have stopped the CNE from turning over tally sheets to Venezuela’s Supreme Justice Tribunal, which Maduro requested on July 31 as part of an official review of the results,” Hetland stated. “Even those sympathetic to Maduro have wondered why the CNE has not found a way to publish this information publicly.”
As Hetland noted, “the opposition’s record on democracy is far from spotless.” A number of opposition leaders were among the architects of the 2002 military coup that attempted but failed to topple the democratically elected government of Hugo Chávez and have backed other anti-democratic actions.
However, Hetland explained, “in recent weeks the opposition has published its electoral tallies on a website that purports to show the results from 80 percent of voting centers. It claims [that the leading opposition candidate Edmundo] González won with two-thirds of the vote while Maduro received only a third.”
To refute the opposition’s assertion, it would be useful to compare its tallies to those released by the CNE. But neither Venezuela’s electoral authority, nor the ruling party, have released any detailed results, the NLR article stated.
The NLR and many other news articles have also reported that the governments of Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico—close allies to Maduro’s government in the past—have issued public statements indicating that the official results of Venezuela’s recent election are either difficult or impossible to believe.
In addition, Maduro’s government unleashed considerable repression against opposition forces since the country’s electoral authorities proclaimed him the winner of the vote on July 28. Much of this repression, the NLR article showed, has been directed against the country’s working people and many in the lower middle classes.
Many of these workers, peasants, small businessmen, students and other young people voted for Maduro in the past and backed his administration. But they have been disillusioned in recent years by an acute and prolonged economic crisis combined with shameless corruption and thuggish behavior by government officials.
The turmoil has prompted nearly eight million Venezuelans—more than 25 percent of a population of 30.2 million in 2014—to leave the country over the last decade.
As Hetland pointed out, regardless of whether fraud was involved in the recent elections, the U.S. government and other imperialist powers have no business meddling in Venezuela’s internal affairs. Any such intervention, and all the U.S.-backed sanctions crippling the country’s economy, should be unequivocally opposed. They are detrimental to the interests of the vast majority. Only Venezuela’s workers and peasants, allied with small businesspeople and other exploited producers, can resolve the crisis engulfing their country.
Taking a look at the evolution of politics in Venezuela since the turn of the century sheds light on the country’s current political crisis.
Maduro was first elected Venezuela’s president in 2013, succeeding Hugo Chávez, who died that year of cancer after serving as the country’s president for nearly 15 years.
How Chávez came to power
Chávez was born into a middle-class family and later became a career military officer. He gained notoriety when he led an unsuccessful military coup in 1992 against the liberal social democratic government of Carlos Andrés Pérez during a period of social unrest. In spite of being one of the world’s largest oil exporters, half of Venezuela’s workforce was unemployed or underemployed at the time, and 70 percent of its people were living below the poverty line.
Chávez was jailed for leading the coup but was pardoned two years later. He went on to form the Fifth Republic Movement. A few years later, in 1998, he was elected Venezuela’s president with wide popular support against the traditional capitalist parties.
Democratic Action (AD), a social democratic party, and the conservative Social Christian COPEI, alternated in Venezuela’s government for decades before Chávez’s election. (COPEI is the acronym in Spanish of the Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente, or Independent Political Electoral Organization Committee.)
Leaders of these parties and many business figures were at the core of the Democratic Coordinator alliance that coalesced in opposition to Chávez. This coalition tried to topple Chávez, including through a short-lived U.S.-backed coup in 2002, and other means, but failed repeatedly.
When they held the reins of government in the 1980s and much of the ’90s, AD and COPEI were responsible for implementing measures that led to a rebellion known as the Caracazo. It broke out in 1989, when the discredited Pérez administration doubled bus fares and hiked prices of gasoline and other essential goods.
An urban revolt then engulfed Caracas and many of the country’s major cities. Working people from city slums—crushed under the burden of capitalist austerity—burned buses, broke into supermarkets to take food, and marched into the neighborhoods of the wealthy.
In response, the social democratic regime sent in the army, which shot at anything that moved. As many as 2,000 people died in Caracas alone. Thousands were wounded. Pérez succeeded in staying in power for a few more years through such ruthless repression. But the events marked the beginning of the breakup of the two-party system that had ruled Venezuela for decades.
The era of Hugo Chávez arrived when he was elected president in 1998 with more than 56 percent of the vote.
Character of Chávez’s regime
Under the Chávez administration, private property in the means of production remained largely intact, with economic power staying firmly in the hands of the country’s wealthiest families. His nationalist regime, however, increasingly came into conflict with the majority of Venezuela’s capitalist class. The clash turned into a collision in the fall of 2001.
At that time, Chávez’s government enacted legislation that, if fully implemented, would have cut into the profits and power of the financial oligarchy. These measures included an agrarian reform law, protections for working fishermen from overfishing by large commercial companies, steps to allow for greater state control of the country’s oil resources, and the allocation of state funds for affordable housing and other social programs.
The new administration also drew the ire of Washington and the local bourgeoisie for cultivating closer political and economic ties with revolutionary Cuba.
Encouraged by these openings, workers and peasants fought for land, jobs, and more democratic rights. These struggles alarmed most of Venezuela’s capitalists and their U.S. backers.
The anti-Chávez opposition organized cazerolazos, large “pot-banging” protest rallies demanding the president’s resignation, in 2001. In 2002 it staged a military coup that removed Chávez from power for two days but was reversed by popular opposition.
This was followed in 2003 by a “strike” in the state-owned oil monopoly, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), instigated by company executives who worked hand-in-glove with top union bureaucrats controlling the oil workers union at the time, lockdowns in other industries aimed at crippling production to accelerate an economic crisis, and armed attacks on government buildings; and a referendum to recall Chávez in 2004.
Washington and other imperialist governments backed these efforts and later imposed debilitating sanctions on Venezuela that largely impacted the country’s working people.
In one popular outpouring after another, however, working people mobilized and defeated every attempt by Venezuela’s capitalist class and its backers abroad to topple Chávez.1
In the process, up to 75,000 peasants succeeded in getting titles to land they tilled, often after occupying large estates; workers reopened factories shut down by their owners, demanding government support to run them as cooperatives or state property; and miners, steelworkers, and others went on strike to improve wages and benefits.
Gains of workers and peasants under Chávez
Through such mobilizations, working people won self-confidence and made some gains. These included pushing the government to seize idle lands and distribute them to landless peasants. Responding to popular demands, the Chávez administration also tightened state control of PDVSA and started using funds from oil exports to launch public works and institute social welfare programs. As a result, the country’s poverty rate was cut by 20 percent.
New PDVSA projects included piping natural gas to working-class neighborhoods that had no access to such resources until then, supplying training and material help for the formation of peasant cooperatives, building affordable housing in workers’ districts, and providing support for government programs in areas around oil installations, including literacy classes and free neighborhood clinics operated by volunteer Cuban doctors.
Ties with Cuba deepened with the implementation of Barrio Adentro (Inside the Neighborhood) in 2003.2
Under this program, which became widely popular over the next few years, thousands of Cuban doctors operated clinics in working-class districts and rural areas, which previously had little or no access to healthcare. The Cuban doctors practiced much-needed preventive medicine and provided routine and emergency health services free of charge.
The Cuban doctors received a stipend of $250 a month to cover living expenses. They lived in workers’ homes in the areas where they served, operating clinics out of community centers and other facilities. They provided much of the medicine, which was donated by Cuba, free of charge. After receiving morning patients at the walk-in clinics, in the afternoons they visited residents in the neighborhoods assigned to them.
Hundreds of Venezuelans I interviewed across the country between 2003 and 2006 were virtually unanimous in saying that the Cuban doctors—unlike many Venezuelan doctors—treated them as human beings, answering their calls after hours, even in the middle of the night.
“When you go to a social security doctor in Venezuela, you are just a number in their eyes,” Joel Mierez, a resident of the Monte Piedad neighborhood of Caracas, told me during a visit there in October 2003. “Sometimes they won’t even look up from their desk. They’ll check off your name, prescribe some pill, and send you off in minutes. But the Cuban doctors care for other human beings. They come visit us at home. They don’t mind the neighborhood. They talk to us and get to know us. They have improved the mood here.”
Mission Robinson, a literacy campaign conducted with material aid and volunteer trainers from Cuba, virtually eliminated illiteracy, especially in rural areas. In October 2005, at the completion of this 27-month-long effort that taught 1.5 million people to read and write, Venezuela was declared “Territory Free of Illiteracy.” It was the second country in Latin America, after Cuba in 1961, to achieve such an accomplishment.3
“The figures were daunting,” Javier Labrada, coordinator of the Cuban volunteers who worked alongside their local colleagues in the country’s education programs at the time, told the Cuban daily Granma in 2005. About 125,000 Venezuelans volunteered for Mission Robinson as facilitators for classes, transported students and materials, and offered their houses and porches as classrooms.
“In 1998, only 59 percent of school-age children were enrolled in school, 1.5 million people were illiterate, more than two million people had not finished the sixth grade, and nearly two million did not have the possibility to finish high school,” Labrada said. “In addition, there was no space in the universities for the 500,000 high school graduates.”
As a result of Mission Robinson and similar efforts, the goal of bringing everyone in the country to a fourth-grade education level was achieved by 2005.
“Without Cuba, Mission Robinson would have been practically impossible,” said Chávez in 2005, thanking the people and the government of Cuba for their contribution in the literacy campaign.
Chávez rejects “Cuban road”
At the same time, the Fifth Republic Movement led by Chávez, which in 2007 fused with other organizations to form the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), rejected the Cuban road toward a genuinely socialist future.
The PSUV refused to lead the country’s working people to end the rule of the capitalists, establish a workers and peasants’ government, nationalize the means of production, and reorganize society based on human solidarity and social equality.
Instead, the PSUV promoted “socialism in the 21st century.” This was a euphemism for maintaining capitalist economic relations modulated by greater state control over some private industries and marked by increasing concentration of governmental power in the hands of the head of state—the president.
The increasingly authoritarian role of the government became crystal clear in 2006. That year, Chávez was re-elected Venezuela’s president with 63 percent of the popular vote. A year earlier, his party had secured complete control of the country’s National Assembly, after the opposition boycotted legislative elections, as well as the Supreme Court and most of the judiciary, and the National Electoral Council.
Following these sweeping victories, Chávez signed into law an “enabling act” allowing him to rule by decree, with virtual dictatorial powers, for up to 18 months. He also floated the idea, repeatedly, of seeking constitutional reform that would permit him to seek reelection indefinitely, perpetuating his power for life.
These are the hallmarks of a Bonapartist regime,4 albeit one with a leftist veneer in this case. They are the opposite of strengthening the political power of workers and peasants.
World-Outlook explained the term Bonapartism in its inaugural article, following the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a right-wing mob that tried to overturn the results of the 2020 U.S. election through violent means. The mob was inspired by the “Big Lie” claim of a “stolen election” by former U.S. president Donald Trump.
World-Outlook called attention to the writings of Marxist scholar George Novack. Decades ago, Novack wrote that Bonapartism “carries to an extreme the concentration of power in the head of the state already discernible in the contemporary imperialist democracies. All important policy decisions are centralized in a single individual equipped with extraordinary emergency powers. He speaks and acts not as the servant of parliament… but in his own right as ‘the man of destiny’ who has been called upon to rescue the nation in its hour of mortal peril.”
Maduro’s regime: Chavismo’s thuggish caricature
After Maduro, a close Chávez ally, assumed power following his predecessor’s death, he elevated the government’s authoritarianism to another level. Beginning six months after his election in 2013, and relying on a string of enabling acts, Maduro has ruled by decree for the majority of his presidency over the last decade.
Under the impact of the ups and downs of the world capitalist market, which included periodic dives in the price of oil; ever-tighter sanctions from Washington and other imperialist powers; and gross mismanagement of state resources by government officials who increasingly used their positions to enrich themselves, Venezuela’s economy went into a tailspin.
Inflation exceeded 100 percent by 2015, spiraling to hyperinflation with a rate of 80,000 percent by the end of 2018. The poverty rate mushroomed to more than 80 percent of the population by 2020. Unemployment became rampant. Shortages of food staples and other basic necessities spread. International financial agencies declared Venezuela in default of paying its debts. This economic and social picture contrasts sharply to the gains, even if modest, that working people made during the Chávez years.
As working-class and middle-class people protested, the Maduro administration used the police and other security forces, the military, as well as extra-legal goon squads to suppress any demands for relief from these unbearable conditions.
This is evidence that the regime had degenerated from the Bonapartism of Chávez to its thuggish caricature.
So, it comes as no surprise that Maduro’s government unleashed fierce repression against protests in working-class barrios of Caracas and other major cities that erupted in response to official claims that Maduro won re-election at the end of July. This is well documented in the NLR article by Hetland.
“A further piece of evidence that counts against Maduro is the explosion of protests across popular-sector barrios on July 29, the day after the election,” Hetland noted. “These were clearly spontaneous, as [the main opposition leader, María Corina] Machado had not called on supporters to take to the streets until the following day.”
“Video evidence suggests that thousands, and likely tens-of-thousands, participated. This chimes with opposition tallies that ostensibly show massive rejection of Maduro in such areas,” Hetland continued:
“Equivalent protests have not occurred during any other recent instances of opposition mobilization, which have been dominated by the middle and upper classes.”
The NLR and other articles have reported that Venezuela’s security forces killed 23 protesters and bystanders during these mobilizations. Maduro’s government has also boasted it arrested 2,000 people during these actions.
Despite these facts, many on the left have been apologizing for Maduro on the basis that his regime is in conflict with Washington and other imperialist powers. Any form of imperialist intervention in Venezuela should be actively opposed. But offering political support to Maduro’s discredited regime harms the interests of Venezuela’s working people.
We share Hetland’s conclusion that “socialists, of any stripe, should not provide cover for a government that fixes elections and then clings to power by brutally punishing its poorest citizens when they protest.”
Note: This analysis reflects the views of all of the editors of World-Outlook.
—World-Outlook, September 17, 2024
https://world-outlook.com/2024/09/17/venezuelas-elections-fraud-foretold/
1 For more information on how working people defeated the 2002 U.S.-backed coup attempt to topple the democratically elected government of Hugo Chávez see ‘We’re fighting to defend workers in Venezuela,’ an eyewitness report published in the August 12, 2002, Militant newspaper.
2 For more information on Barrio Adentro, see “Cuban doctors in Venezuela operate free neighborhood clinics” and “Competent neighborhood clinics operated by Cuban doctors spread across Venezuela,” published in the November 3, 2003, and May 11, 2004, issues of the Militant newsweekly, respectively.
3 For more information on Venezuela’s literacy campaign, see “Venezuelans carry out literacy campaign with aid and volunteer trainers from Cuba” and “Nationwide literacy campaigns involve four million in adult education classes,” published in the November 10, 2003, and May 11, 2004, issues of the Militant newsweekly, respectively.
4 In contemporary times, the term “Bonapartism” has been used in a general sense to describe autocratic, highly centralized regimes dominated by the military.